I got into Montclair at about 7:00 p.m. and spent several minutes wondering where I could park. I’d never been to Outpost in the Burbs before. In fact, I’d never heard of the place until a man simply known to me as MRBARQUE posted that he was going to see the Kennedys there and wondered if any other Idiots would be showing up. I’d always heard about Kennedys shows in New York, never in New Jersey. I decided to get a ticket and go.

I found a parking spot that seemed legal and walked around Montclair. It’s a nice town, really. Lots of shops on Bloomfield Avenue, including a cool little record store called Crazy Rhythms where I got my ticket the night before. As a couple screamed at each other at a bus stop, I thought Montclair was like somebody built a town out of spare parts left over from Summit and Clifton. I stopped for a quick bite at a diner called Midtown. With only one waitress in the place, the wait was a bit long. I didn’t need a menu as I ordered a reuben and a Coke. The pickle was bad, although the sandwich wasn’t. It didn’t take too long to get to me, and there was only one hair in it. A short one, at that.

I was sitting in the back with bicycle cops, their environmentally friendly machines parked along side where they ate. Three of the four looked more like football players than cyclists. Made me glad to be on the right side of the law.

The waitress was running around the place like crazy, yet totally in control instead of harried and stressed. She seemed oblivious to the bra strap falling off of her shoulder. I got my check for $7.47 and left a two dollar tip. She cheerfully wished me a good night as I paid her at the register, even before she saw the tip. It was a very pleasant night as I walked back outside, but I couldn’t track down where the mysterious smell of fish was coming from.

I went back to the church where Outpost in the Burbs is. This church is more like a castle in the middle of the town. Beautiful architecture, scalloped archway doors, and a magnificent tower that bore an inscription saying it was erected in 1915 if I read my Roman numerals correctly. Funny thing about churches; for the words spoken inside those great stone walls, people have lived and died, killed and been killed. Agree with them or not though, I don’t know anybody who can look at an old church and not stand in awe of the human achievements of architecture.

There seemed to be 2 groups of people on either side of the church building. As I took down notes in the dark, a lady with her son asked where the entrance was for The Kennedys show, and I apologetically admitted I’d never been there before, but told her about the groups of people. They walked off to my left. I began to walk in that direction after I jotted down some more notes, and saw a gentleman in a blue sweater. I asked him if I was heading the right way for the entrance.

"What are you here to see?" he asked.

"The Kennedys," I said.

"The movie?"

I suddenly had a vision of Kevin Costner singing Hey Vin. "No. I guess I’m going the wrong way. Thank you sir."

I got on the line at the other side of the church and it was an impressive turnout of people. As I was standing there, a guy in a black T-shirt and jeans was walking by the line calling out "Cold beer. Hot dogs. Cold beer. Hey, we need a concession stand here." He walked up the stairs and into another entrance of the building. I knew it had to be Pete Kennedy. A little while later, he emerged again and gave the "Cold beer" calls. "Where, man, where?" I said. "Come on, stop teasing us like that." He looked like David Spade made up to look like Neil Young.

The line hadn’t moved yet, but I saw up the line Gary the Grumpster. I called out and then wandered up to say hello and ask, "Is that guy Barque here? I was hoping to meet up with him."

"I think he’s further up the line," Gary said. I thought about calling out "Anybody here with an AOL screen name of MRBARQUE?", but I decided against it. Yelling "Who here is an Idiot?" was definitely out of the question.

When we got inside the upstairs room, I sat two seats back from Gary. For some reason, a plastic yellow construction hat was sitting on a piano by the stage. They shut the lights off slowly before Joanne, one of the coordinators of the Outpost came up to the mike to speak quickly and introduce the night’s opener, "He calls himself King of the Brooklyn Delta. David Hamburger." We clapped for a while. The clapping died down. No sign of David. About 2 seconds after we had stopped clapping, he came running into the room with his guitar. "Smooth and professional," he said, laughing at himself. "Thanks for waiting."

David Hamburger began with a very moving song called The Reason That I Cry. He then went into a piece called Statesville, where he was picking at his guitar wildly with his long fingers, playing like a man obsessed with breaking some kind of speed record.

"I was in Boston all week recording songs for the new album," he said, pointing to his guitar. "These are the very same strings I was using. So I made up what I thought was a cool setlist for tonight, but it was all songs from the forthcoming album. As president of my own record company, I figured now would be the time when I would hand myself a note that said ‘Play something from the album you already have. Marketing, baby. Marketing’. So this song is to satisfy the suits in their big offices. It’s a happy reminiscence about a day job and substance abuse." The substance turned out to be coffee, as he played a fun song called A Little Caffeine is Good for the Soul.

"When Moses led the Jews out of Egypt

Just one thing he brought for the trip.

‘Cause he raised his arms and parted the sea,

And you can’t do that drinking herbal tea."

"I have a hard time finding folk and blues CDs," he said. "I look under the folk and blues sections, but I wind up finding them in with the regular ‘popular’ section. They always have these stickers on them that say ‘File Under Pop’, I guess because they don’t want to be in the little ghetto in the back of Tower Records. I want a sticker on my next album to say ‘File Under Hypothetical Realism’. Stuff that would have happened if my life was cooler." He then played his song Photograph, which was a really touching account of someone who’d played music in various local scenes all his life. He finished his set with another new song called Indigo Rose.

The Kennedys were introduced and took a few minutes to adjust mikes and set up. Pete told a story of the first time they were apart after meeting in Austin. Pete was on the road backing Nanci Griffith and Maura was still in Austin. They had a couple of days free when Pete was in Telluride. They were 1,000 miles away from each other, and each drove about 500 miles to a central meeting place, which turned out to be Lubbock, Texas. "You know those pictures that came back from Mars? That’s lush compared to Lubbock. But we met up, and it felt good to be together. We went to Buddy Holly’s grave, the only tourist attraction in Lubbock. It was really neat. People would put guitar picks in the grass next to the grave, which was good for us, because we needed a few."

They were finished setting up, and played a very energetic Life is Large. I was immediately impressed by their energy. I wasn’t expecting them to be such furious players, but they were. Maura had a beautiful sunburst colored Gibson acoustic, and she played the hell out of it, including slapping the strings as one would an electric bass. Likewise for Pete, who had a less flashy looking guitar, but sounded fantastic, of course.

I also enjoyed their sense of play, particularly Pete’s pause during an instrumental where he broke into a couple of bars of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Also, during another particularly frenetic jam, he gave a tip of the musical hat to John Coltrane as he slipped in a bit of My Favorite Things.

Maura started talking about their new house. "It’s really cool because it has a flat roof. We go up there in the morning with our cereal and our notebooks and start writing."

"We don’t have a TV", Pete interjected.

"This can be a good thing," Maura continued, "Kill your television," she laughed, quoting my favorite bumper sticker. They talked about something they had read by Vaclav Havel, which they stayed up all night talking about and trying to coalesce into a song. When it was apparent they could not do that, they wrote a song with a more accessible theme of reading something and staying up all night talking about it. The song which kicks off their latest album, Common Bond.

They next did the song Angels Cry, which was inspired by a film that Nanci Griffith turned them on to, the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. Angels Cry was immediately followed by a fantastic and inspired cover of Wall of Death, which ended with an awkward but cute high-5, and a story about how they used to run into a lot of people who asked about the song, "Is that ‘let me ride on the waterbed?’".

Pete and Maura asked us to sing along with the chorus of the next song, Just Like Henry David. "My father had been working for years on his one book," Maura said. "I thought all fathers had a manuscript. He’s a Thoreau scholar, and he finished his book, called The Roots of Walden and the Tree of Life. I thought, being a songwriter, I could do something really cool for my dad and put him in a song with Henry David Thoreau. He loved it."

We had a blast of a sing-along, and then Pete stepped forward to play a piece from an all instrumental album called Shearwater. "Pete recorded this album with two very fine musicians, Jerry Douglas and Tony Rice. I’m going to attempt to cover for both of them. Pray for me, okay?" After that beautiful instrumental, they finished up their first set with River of Fallen Stars.

I milled around a bit downstairs, and managed to get on the mailing lists for both The Kennedys and David Hamburger, as well as buying their latest CDs and getting them autographed; a first for me. I got to talk to Maura, and she was really sweet and so excited to be there. "This is such a great room. It’s so cool here."

I talked a bit to Grumpster, and saw fellow Idiot Devorah walk by. I called out to her and said hello. She introduced me to her son, Josh, a Metallica fan who was enjoying The Kennedys nonetheless. "I thought that was you outside," she said. "Me?" I asked, then realized she was the woman who asked earlier where to go into the building. "Hey, that was you? I couldn’t see you."

I got back to my seat, just as they were starting to close the doors for the second set. Pete and Maura talked about the Liverpool College of Hope and the Benefit CD they contributed a song to, a song called You Can’t Kill Hope with a Gun, which they started the set with. They followed with a song from the new album called Jesse, about a father hoping his daughter will grow up a wild and creative romantic.

"A little something we like to do," Pete said, "is to get email requests from people, and then try to do them. We’ll try to do it, whether we know it or not, but we reserve the right to refuse it." Maura picked up the plastic yellow construction hat, picked out a slip of paper, and read the request.

"Innagaddadavida?" she laughed. Pete played a few notes and said, "We won’t be able to do the drum solo, so we have to refuse that one."

Maura pulled out the next slip of paper. "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina." Again, Pete said they’d have to refuse that one.

She pulled out another slip of paper. "Freebird?" This time, we the audience begged them not to do it.

Maura pulled another request. "Tomorrow from Annie? Pete, you stuffed this, didn’t you?"

"I didn’t. I didn’t," Pete said, refusing that one as well.

She pulled out another slip of paper. "Anything from Riverdance? Pete, you stuffed this."

"Come on, Maura. Start dancing. Show them what you got." Maura instead pulled another request from the plastic hardhat, a seemingly much larger piece of paper than the others. "How about this one? Wait, by The Beatles, from Rubber Soul."

Pete said, "I don’t know if we know that one, but I think we can do it." They gave a T-shirt to the winning requestor, and then did a very solid version of this not so simple song as the plastic hardhat lay on its side, empty.

They then played another new song which Pete said was inspired by a line from a T.S. Elliot work, the song called The Fire & the Rose. Then they talked about their love of radio, mainly the way radio used to be. "Free form radio is gone now," Pete said. "Except for one guy in New York on Sunday nights on WNEW. Anybody here listen to Vin Scelsa?" About half the room applauded. "We wrote this song for his fiftieth birthday, but we found out about it late, so we didn’t get it to him in time."

Maura continued, "We had it pressed on a single CD and told him this was it; nobody else had a copy of it. But as we were putting this album together, we loved this song so much we couldn’t not put it on there. Except that somebody from Rounder said ‘You should change the part where it says Scelsa, because nobody outside of New York is going to understand’, and we just said, ‘No way’."

They played the song Hey Vin, then went into a cover of The Byrds song Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone), which Pete followed with a Bach piece rendered very prettily on acoustic guitar. Then they did another Byrds cover, Eight Miles High, which included a jam at the end that featured a pinch of Bouree and a dash of Orange Blossom Special. They finished their second set with their song One Heart, One Soul.

They came out again for an encore, this time with David Hamburger playing slide on a Dobro, for the song Sirens, which comically included bits of Shaft and Pinball Wizard, Maura doing the Pete Townsend windmill for the complete effect. Then a reprise of Life is Large.

Pete stepped to the mike. "We’re going to finish with a traditional English folk song. It has a very simple three word refrain, and feel free to sing along. You should be able to pick up on it right away." The so-called traditional English folk song turned out to be She Loves You, by The Beatles.

I finally got a chance to say hello to the mysterious MRBARQUE, who I thanked for posting about the show which I never would have known about otherwise. I also got one more opportunity to talk to Maura Kennedy and thank her for a wonderful time. It was clear that they had a great time as well. "All these people. Wow, where did they all come from?" I told her I found out about the show on the Idiot’s Delight digest. She was really happy to hear that word of mouth, even in a virtual way, is still very much in effect.

"When I go to shows like this," I told her, "they’re usually very nice, very mellow. I wasn’t expecting you two to be so lively. You guys were cranking. You’re great. I thought I smelled wood burning, you two were playing so hard."

Back out into the Montclair midnight, I located my car and found my way back home. I’m hoping to see The Kennedys again, as I was very impressed with their live show. I also enjoyed David Hamburger, and I look forward to his new album.

It was nice meeting up with fellow Idiots, of course, and even though I burned a significant portion of my weekend writing this, I hope I have now proven that I can write long concert reviews about other artists besides Tori Amos. :-)

--Rich K